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Henrietta Lacks (born Loretta Pleasant; August 1, 1920 – October 4, 1951) was an African-American woman whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. An immortalized cell line reproduces indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data to the present day.
Lacks was the unwitting source of these cells from a tumor
biopsied during treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in
Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951. These cells were then cultured by George Otto
Gey, who created the cell line known as HeLa, which is still used for medical
research. As was then the practice, no consent was required to culture the
cells obtained from Lacks's treatment. Neither she nor her family was
compensated for the extraction or use of the HeLa cells.
Even though some information about the origins of HeLa's
immortalized cell lines was known to researchers after 1970, the Lacks family
was not made aware of the line's existence until 1975. With knowledge of the
cell line's genetic provenance becoming public, its use for medical research
and for commercial purposes continues to raise concerns about privacy and
patients' rights.
Biography
Early life
Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1920,
in Roanoke, Virginia, to Eliza Pleasant (née Lacks) (1886–1924) and John "Johnny" Randall Pleasant
(1881–1969). She is remembered as having hazel eyes, a small waist, size 6
shoes, and always wearing red nail polish and a neatly pleated skirt. Her
family is uncertain how her name changed from Loretta to Henrietta, but she was
nicknamed Hennie. When Lacks was four years old in 1924, her mother died giving
birth to her tenth child. Unable to care for the children alone after his
wife's death, Lacks's father moved the family to Clover, Virginia, where the
children were distributed among relatives. Lacks ended up with her maternal
grandfather, Thomas "Tommy" Henry Lacks, in a two-story log cabin
that was once the slave quarters on the plantation that had been owned by
Henrietta's white great-grandfather and great-uncle. She shared a room with her
nine-year-old first cousin (their mothers were sisters) and her future husband,
David "Day" Lacks
(1915–2002).
Like most members of her family living in Clover, Lacks
worked as a tobacco farmer starting from an early age. She fed the animals,
tended the garden, and toiled in the tobacco fields. She attended the
designated black school two miles away from the cabin until she had to drop out
to help support the family when she was in the sixth grade. In 1935, when Lacks
was 14 years old, she gave birth to a son, Lawrence Lacks. In 1939, her
daughter Elsie Lacks (1939–1955) was born. Both children were fathered by Day
Lacks. Elsie had epilepsy and cerebral palsy and was described by the family as
"different" or "deaf and dumb".
Marriage and family
On April 10, 1941, David "Day"
Lacks and Henrietta Lacks were married in Halifax County, Virginia. Later that
year, their cousin, Fred Garrett, convinced the couple to leave the tobacco
farm in Virginia and move to Turner Station, near Dundalk, Maryland, in
Baltimore County, so Day could work in Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point,
Maryland. Not long after they moved to Maryland, Garrett was called to fight in
World War II. With the savings gifted to him by Garrett, Day Lacks was able to
purchase a house at 713 New Pittsburgh Avenue in Turner Station. Now part of
Dundalk, Turner Station was one of the oldest and largest African-American
communities in Baltimore County at that time.
Living in Maryland, Henrietta and Day Lacks had three more
children: David "Sonny"
Lacks Jr. in 1947, Deborah Lacks (later known as Deborah Lacks Pullum) in 1949
(died 2009), and Joseph Lacks (later known as Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman after
converting to Islam) in 1950. Henrietta gave birth to her last child at the
Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in November 1950, four and a half months
before she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Zakariyya believes his birth to
be a miracle as he was "fighting off
the cancer cells growing all around him". Around the same time, Elsie
was placed in the Hospital for the Negro Insane, later renamed Crownsville
Hospital Center, where she died in 1955 at 15 years of age. Historian Paul Lurz
says that it is possible that Elsie was subjected to the pneumoencephalography
procedure, where a hole was drilled into a patient's head to drain fluid from
the brain, which was then replaced with oxygen or helium to make it easier to
see the patient's brain in X-rays.
Both Lacks and her husband were Catholic.
Illness
Diagnosis and
treatment
On January 29, 1951, Lacks went to Johns Hopkins, the only
hospital in the area that treated black patients, because she felt a "knot" in her womb. She had
previously told her cousins about the "knot"
and they assumed correctly that she was pregnant. But after giving birth to
Joseph, Lacks had a severe hemorrhage. Her primary care doctor, William C.
Wade, M.D., referred her back to Johns Hopkins. There, her doctor, Howard W.
Jones, took a biopsy of a mass found on Lacks's cervix for laboratory testing.
Soon after, Lacks was told that she had a malignant epidermoid carcinoma of the
cervix. In 1970, physicians discovered that she had been misdiagnosed and actually
had an adenocarcinoma. This was a common mistake at the time, and the treatment
would not have differed.
Lacks was treated with radium tube inserts as an inpatient
and discharged a few days later with instructions to return for X-ray
treatments as a follow-up. During her treatments, two samples were taken from
Lacks's cervix without her permission or knowledge; one sample was of healthy
tissue and the other was cancerous. These samples were given to George Otto
Gey, a physician and cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins. The cells from the
cancerous sample eventually became known as the HeLa immortal cell line, a
commonly used cell line in contemporary biomedical research.
Death and burial
On August 8, 1951, Lacks, who was 31 years old, went to
Johns Hopkins for a routine treatment session and asked to be admitted due to
continued severe abdominal pain. She received blood transfusions and remained
at the hospital until her death on October 4, 1951. A partial autopsy showed
that the cancer had metastasized throughout her entire body.
Lacks was buried in an unmarked grave in the family
cemetery, in a section of Clover, Virginia, called Lackstown. Lacks's exact
burial location is unknown, but the family believes that it is within a few
feet of her mother's gravesite, which for decades was the only one in the
family to have been marked with a tombstone. In 2010, Roland Pattillo, a
faculty member of the Morehouse School of Medicine who had worked with George
Gey and knew the Lacks family, donated a headstone for Lacks. This prompted her
family to raise money for a headstone for Elsie Lacks as well, which was
dedicated on the same day. The book-shaped headstone of Henrietta Lacks
contains an epitaph written by her grandchildren that reads:
Henrietta Lacks,
August 1, 1920 – October 4, 1951
In loving memory of a phenomenal woman,
Wife and mother who
touched the lives of many.
Here lies Henrietta
Lacks (HeLa). Her immortal
Cells will continue to help mankind forever.
Eternal Love and Admiration,
From Your Family
Medical and
scientific research
Dividing HeLa cells in culture. The cells can be seen
metaphase and telophase, different stages of cell division.
George Otto Gey, the first researcher to study Lacks's
cancerous cells, observed that these cells were unusual in that they reproduced
at a very high rate and could be kept alive long enough to allow more in-depth
examination. Until then, cells cultured for laboratory studies survived for
only a few days at most, which was not long enough to perform a variety of
different tests on the same sample. Lacks's cells were the first to be observed
that could be divided multiple times without dying, which is why they became known
as "immortal". After
Lacks's death, Gey had Mary Kubicek, his lab assistant; take further HeLa
samples while Henrietta's body was at Johns Hopkins' autopsy facility. The
roller-tube technique was the method used to culture the cells obtained from the
samples that Kubicek collected. Gey was able to start a cell line from Lacks's
sample by isolating one specific cell and repeatedly dividing it, meaning that
the same cell could then be used for conducting many experiments. They became
known as HeLa cells, because Gey's standard method for labeling samples was to
use the first two letters of the patient's first and last names.
The ability to rapidly reproduce HeLa cells in a laboratory
setting has led to many important breakthroughs in biomedical research. For
example, by 1954, Jonas Salk was using HeLa cells in his research to develop
the polio vaccine. To test his new vaccine, the cells were mass-produced in the
first-ever cell production factory. Additionally, Chester M. Southam, a leading
virologist, injected HeLa cells into cancer patients, prison inmates, and
healthy individuals in order to observe whether cancer could be transmitted as
well as to examine if one could become immune to cancer by developing an
acquired immune response.
HeLa cells were in high demand and put into mass production.
They were mailed to scientists around the globe for "research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic
substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific pursuits". HeLa
cells were the first human cells successfully cloned, in 1955, and have since
been used to test human sensitivity to tape, glue, cosmetics, and many other
products. There are almost 11,000 patents involving HeLa cells.
In the early 1970s, a large portion of other cell cultures
became contaminated by HeLa cells. As a result, members of Henrietta Lacks's
family received solicitations for blood samples from researchers hoping to
learn about the family's genetics in order to differentiate between HeLa cells
and other cell lines.
Alarmed and confused, several family members began
questioning why they were receiving so many telephone calls requesting blood
samples. In 1975, the family also learned through a chance dinner-party
conversation that material originating in Henrietta Lacks was continuing to be
used for medical research. Prior to this, the family had never discussed
Henrietta's illness and death among themselves.
Consent issues and
privacy concerns
Neither Henrietta Lacks nor her family gave her physicians
permission to harvest her cells. At that time, permission was neither required
nor customarily sought. The cells were used in medical research and for
commercial purposes. In the 1980s, family medical records were published
without family consent. A similar issue was brought up in the Supreme Court of
California case of Moore v. Regents of
the University of California in 1990. The court ruled that a person's
discarded tissue and cells are not their property and can be commercialized.
In March 2013, researchers published the DNA sequence of the
genome of a strain of HeLa cells. The Lacks family discovered this when the
author Rebecca Skloot informed them. There were objections from the Lacks
family about the genetic information that was available for public access. Jeri
Lacks Whye, a grandchild of Henrietta Lacks, said to The New York Times, "the biggest concern was privacy—what
information was actually going to be out there about our grandmother, and what
information they can obtain from her sequencing that will tell them about her
children and grandchildren and going down the line." That same year
another group working on a different HeLa cell line's genome under National
Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, submitted it for publication. In August
2013, an agreement was announced between the family and the NIH that gave the
family some control over access to the cells' DNA sequence found in the two
studies along with a promise of acknowledgement in scientific papers. In
addition, two family members will join the six-member committee that will
regulate access to the sequence data.
In October 2021, Lacks's estate filed a lawsuit against
Thermo Fisher Scientific for profiting from the HeLa cell line without Lacks's
consent, asking for "the full amount
of [Thermo Fisher's] net profits". On July 31, 2023, Thermo Fisher
Scientific settled with the Lacks family on undisclosed terms.
Recognition
In 1996, Morehouse School of Medicine held its first annual
HeLa Women's Health Conference. Led by physician Roland Pattillo, the
conference is held to give recognition to Henrietta Lacks, her cell line, and "the valuable contribution made by
African Americans to medical research and clinical practice". The
mayor of Atlanta declared the date of the first conference, October 11, 1996, "Henrietta Lacks Day".
Lacks's contributions continue to be celebrated at yearly events
in Turner Station. At one such event in 1997, then-U.S. Congressman from
Maryland, Robert Ehrlich, presented a congressional resolution recognizing
Lacks and her contributions to medical science and research.
In 2010, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and
Translational Research established the annual Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture
Series, to honor Henrietta Lacks and the global impact of HeLa cells on medicine
and research.
In 2011, Morgan State University in Baltimore granted Lacks
a posthumous honorary doctorate in public service. Also in 2011, the Evergreen
School District in Vancouver, Washington, named their new high school focused
on medical careers the Henrietta Lacks Health and Bioscience High School,
becoming the first organization to memorialize her publicly by naming a school
in her honor.
In 2014, Lacks was inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall
of Fame. In 2017, a minor planet in the main asteroid belt was named "359426 Lacks" in her honor.
In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary for
her, as part of the Overlooked history project. Also in 2018, the National
Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of African-American History and
Culture jointly announced the accession of a portrait of Lacks by Kadir Nelson.
On October 6, 2018, Johns Hopkins University announced plans
to name a research building in honor of Lacks. The announcement was made at the
9th annual Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture in the Turner Auditorium in East
Baltimore by Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels and Paul B.
Rothman, CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine and dean of the medical faculty of the
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, surrounded by several of Lacks's
descendants. "Through her life and
her immortal cells, Henrietta Lacks made an immeasurable impact on science and
medicine that has touched countless lives around the world," Daniels
said. "This building will stand as a
testament to her transformative impact on scientific discovery and the ethics
that must undergird its pursuit. We at Johns Hopkins are profoundly grateful to
the Lacks family for their partnership as we continue to learn from Mrs.
Lacks's life and to honor her enduring legacy." The building will
adjoin the Berman Institute of Bioethics' Deering Hall, located at the corner
of Ashland and Rutland Avenues and "will support programs that enhance
participation and partnership with members of the community in research that
can benefit the community, as well as extend the opportunities to further study
and promote research ethics and community engagement in research through an
expansion of the Berman Institute and its work."
In 2020, Lacks was inducted into the National Women's Hall
of Fame.
In 2021, the Henrietta Lacks Enhancing Cancer Research Act
of 2019 became law; it states the Government Accountability Office must
complete a study about barriers to participation that exist in cancer clinical
trials that are federally funded for populations that have been underrepresented
in such trials.
In October 2021, the University of Bristol unveiled a statue
of Lacks at Royal Fort House in the city. The sculpture was created by Helen
Wilson-Roe and was the first statue of a black woman made by a black woman for
a public space in the United Kingdom.
On October 13, 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO)
presented the Director General Award to Lawrence Lacks, the son of Henrietta
Lacks, in recognition of her unknowing contribution to science and medicine.
Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist at the WHO, said: "I cannot think of any other single cell line or lab reagent
that's been used to this extent and has resulted in so many advances."
On March 15, 2022, United States Rep. Kwesi Mfume (D-Md)
filed legislation to posthumously award the Congressional Gold Medal to
Henrietta Lacks for her distinguished contributions to science. The award is
one of the most prestigious civilian honors given by the United States
government.
On December 19, 2022, it was announced that a bronze statue
honoring Henrietta Lacks would be erected in Roanoke, Virginia's Henrietta
Lacks Plaza, previously named Lee Plaza after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. A
statue of Lee was removed from the site in the wake of the protests following
the murder of George Floyd.
On June 13, 2023, Loudoun County Public Schools Board
members approved the name of the new school, Henrietta Lacks Elementary School,
in Aldie, Virginia. The school will serve 960 students from kindergarten
through 2nd grade and is expected to open in August 2024.
In popular culture
The question of how and whether her race affected her
treatment, the lack of obtaining consent, and her relative obscurity, continues
to be controversial.
The HeLa cell line's connection to Henrietta Lacks was first
brought to popular attention in March 1976 with a pair of articles in the
Detroit Free Press and Rolling Stone written by reporter Michael Rogers. In
1998, Adam Curtis directed a BBC documentary about Henrietta Lacks called The
Way of All Flesh.
Rebecca Skloot documented extensive histories of both the
HeLa cell line and the Lacks family in two articles published in 2000 and 2001 and
in her 2010 book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Skloot worked with
Deborah Lacks, who was determined to learn more about her mother, on the book.
She used her first royalty check from the book to start the Henrietta Lacks
Foundation, which has provided funds like college tuition and medical procedures
for Henrietta's family.
HBO announced in 2010 that Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball were
developing a film project based on Skloot's book, and in 2016 filming
commenced. With Winfrey in the leading role of Deborah Lacks, Henrietta's
daughter. The film The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was released in 2017,
with Renée Elise Goldsberry portraying Lacks. Sons David Lacks Jr. and
Zakariyya Rahman and granddaughter Jeri Lacks, were consultants for the film.
HBO also commissioned Kadir Nelson for an oil painting of
Lacks. In 2018, the portrait was jointly acquired by the National Museum of
African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian's National Portrait
Gallery. The wallpaper in the painting is made up of the "Flower of Life" alluding to the immortality of her cells.
The flowers on her dress resemble images of cell structures, and the two
missing buttons on her dress symbolize her cells taken without permission.
NBC's Law & Order aired its own fictionalized version of
Lacks's story in the 2010 episode "Immortal",
which Slate referred to as "shockingly
close to the true story" and the musical groups Jello Biafra and the
Guantanamo School of Medicine and Yeasayer both released songs about Henrietta
Lacks and her legacy.
Members of the Lacks family authored their own stories for
the first time in 2013, when Lacks's oldest son and his wife, Lawrence and
Bobbette Lacks, wrote a short digital memoir called "Hela Family Stories: Lawrence and Bobbette", with
first-hand accounts of their memories of Henrietta Lacks while she was alive
and of their own efforts to keep the youngest children out of unsafe living
environments following their mother's death.
The HeLa Project, a multimedia exhibition to honor Lacks,
opened in 2017 in Baltimore at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African
American History & Culture. It included a portrait by Kadir Nelson and a
poem by Saul Williams.
HeLa, a play by Chicago playwright J. Nicole Brooks, was
commissioned by Sideshow Theatre Company in 2016, with a public staged reading
on July 31, 2017. The play was produced by Sideshow at Chicago's Greenhouse
Theater Center from November 18 to December 23, 2018. The play uses Lacks's
life story as a jumping point for a larger conversation about Afrofuturism,
scientific progress, and bodily autonomy.
In the series El Ministerio del Tiempo, the immortality of
her cells in the lab is cited as the precedent for the character Arteche's "extreme resistance to infections, to
injuries, and to cellular degeneration. In other words to aging": that his
cells are immortal.
In the Netflix original movie Project Power (2020), the case
of Henrietta Lacks is cited by one of the villains of the story as an example
of unwilling trials giving rise to advances for the greater good.
The JJ Doom album Key to the Kuffs (2012) includes the song
Winter Blues that contains the lyrics "We
could live forever like Henrietta Lacks cells".
Yeasayer wrote a song about Lacks, entitled "Henrietta," for their 2012
album Fragrant World.
Notes
"In Steve Silberman's Book Review of The
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Nature 463, 610; 2010), ... Your lead-in
claims that the death of Henrietta Lacks "led to the first immortal cell
line", but that distinction belongs to the L929 cell line, which was
derived from mouse connective tissue and described almost a decade earlier (W.
Earle J. Natl Cancer Inst. 4, 165–212; 1943). As Silberman notes, “Lacks's was the first mass-produced human
cell line."
Squamous cell
carcinoma is a cancer of the squamous cells, a type of epithelial cell, and is
the second-most common type of skin cancer. They are found on the neck, head,
cervix, and anus, as well as other body sites.
Adenocarcinomas are a
type of cancerous tumor or an abnormal growth of epithelial tissue. 10% to 15%
of cancers of the cervix are adenocarcinomas, the rest more commonly being
squamous cell carcinomas.
The roller-tube
technique was invented by George Gey in his lab at the University of
Pittsburgh. "And then there was the
roller drum, the invention that churned in the enormous incubator room Gey
built to keep the cell cultures warm. The huge metal drum with holes covering
its inner surface gyrated like a cement mixer 24 hours a day. And tucked within
each hole, at the bottom of Gey's home-blown-glass roller tubes, were tiny
pieces of tissue bathed in nutrient-rich fluids, gathering the nourishment
necessary for survival. As the drum rotated one turn every hour, the cells
surfaced, free to breathe and excrete until the liquid bathed them again. If
all went well, the cells adhered to the walls of the tubes and began to
flourish." – Rebecca Skloot
This method of growing tissue cultures was also used in the
development of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine and by John Enders in his Nobel prize-winning
polio research.
"The Lacks family and the N.I.H. settled
on an agreement: the data from both studies should be stored in the institutes'
database of genotypes and phenotypes. Researchers who want to use the data can
apply for access and will have to submit annual reports about their research. A
so-called HeLa Genome Data Access working group at the N.I.H. will review the
applications. Two members of the Lacks family will be members. The agreement
does not provide the Lacks family with proceeds from any commercial products
that may be developed from research on the HeLa genome."
Links
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/henrietta-lacks-family-coming-more-141742101.html
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